Alumni News

Jake Borndal lives and works in New York. He recently received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Solo exhibitions include Chit Chat at ΚΘΦ Gallery, Richmond; Pot Holder at Gallery Four, Baltimore; and Pot Hole at Terminal Projects, Brooklyn. His work has been included in group shows at venues such as Material Art Fair, Mexico City; Reunion Gallery, Zurich; Mass MoCA; Le Magasin, Grenoble; MoMA PS1, Postmasters Gallery, and Pierogi in New York, among others.

Artist book Solipsistic Trollop Mystic will accompany the show with writing by Savannah Knoop and Kate Scherer.

* A new iteration of the Love for Love series (2012-2015), a socially engaged project comprising art and poetry workshops in and around Chapel Hill, NC and Nashville, TN; two thousand campaign-style buttons; 350 cards created with prisoners on death row; signage; collaborations with community organizations, area artists and poets, and public participants.

The grant will support a new project as an official affiliate artist with the Los Angeles-based Anti-Recidivism Coalition with regular visits/working sessions from Arizona. The working title for our project is The Renewal Project: Art, Policy, and Perception. The project will unfold over the next year.

In the image above, I was facilitating a discussion with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition members about working together and what that might look like. We were also talking with them about the work in Arizona involving Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Threads is an artistic collaboration developed in 2013 in an effort to reveal the dignity and struggle in these underlying, often forgotton stories behind Lewis Hine’s photographs of child labor associated with the Hermitage Museum. The exhibit explores the relationship between art and labor as part of a larger human struggle — one that can still be connected, like a thread, through time and art to change the way we see the valued objects of today.http://www.thehermitagemuseum.org/

“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualism in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. … It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships. space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” -Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

Bonnie Staley’s recent paintings playfully refigure the female body, possible lending the cyborgian pin-up woman super powers in their fictional world laden with disruptive humor and fantasy. Cathy Fairbanks’ paper maché busts stand with an empathetic insistence of the figure as a mutable art object. Empathy is a state of recognition of the infinite difference of others, of ourselves, and it is the backbone of the cyborg. While Staley’s women seem to aptly adjust to and even thrive within the environments of which they are both products and agents, Fairbanks’ cyborg is generally “sick”; ill but surviving. The cyborg allows us to think about the need to adjust to our environment. It is in some ways the form as it reflect the architecture of life and culture.

“It is my pleasure to inform you that VCU graduate Ian McMahon received a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in Crafts/Sculpture… Only 2% of the applicants receive this award, so it is quite an honor…”

Join us for an evening of food, drink, and enthusiastic bidding! Proceeds support 1708 Gallery’s 36th year of presenting exceptional new art.

CABIN FEVER will include Live and Silent Art Auctions with works by an outstanding group of artists and will feature a special selection of works by LA-based artist Kristin Calabrese. In addition 1708 will offer a limited edition Cabin Fever letterpress print designed by Nashville’s legendary Hatch Show Print Shop. Auction artwork will be on view at 1708 Gallery from Friday, February 13 through Saturday, February 21. Please visit www.1708gallery.org for more information.

I am very excited to announce the exhibition of “You Can’t Go Home”. An interview project, with artists in their homes, in fog. The video installation speaks about home and where/how it exists for artists living in New York City. Threads of subject matter oscillate between murky-grey areas of discussion in a similar manner to the way the word “home” itself transforms meaning. “Home” can time travel in a single paragraph, often referring to a place that existed in the past when we look back to a point of origin, the present when we think of where we currently “hang our hat,” and to the future when we dream of the home we one day hope to inhabit. The word connotes geography, architecture, people, and an accumulation of experiences. New York City seems to magnify a conflict of “home.” Home tends to shift, change and vanish at times anywhere one lives, but in New York it can happen with a harsh frequency. Artists in this city come from vastly different backgrounds and locations, and home can manifest in a vaporous, paradoxical way.